An early post this week, as tomorrow is my author signing at the Tanglewood Barnes and Noble. I’ll be there and setting up by 6pm so if you have a book to bring for signing or are looking to buy a paper copy, please stop by!

Now, on to the subject at hand. I’ve been reading The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley and I have to say that this book has literally rocked my socks.

You may have picked up by now that I am a self-proclaimed feminist. This is not always considered a good descriptor of a human being, but I find that people who don’t want to be your friend if you call yourself a feminist are not usually nice people. I say this because of personal experience. As a writer, I primarily try to tell balanced stories with varied female (and male) characters. I don’t always succeed. I grow a lot from project to project. I’m still learning, and that’s okay.

I have the honor of being a relatively privileged woman. I am white, able-bodied, thin, and adjectives most commonly used to describe me are “smart” and “pretty”. This is not ego talking, or not ego for the sake of hearing itself. I find all sorts of people beautiful and admirable who do not, classically, fit these descriptors. This is an observation of social norms. I have privilege. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel like screaming every time I turn on the news and read about the most recent rape acquittal or talk to a friend who has just experienced some terrible abuse from a partner or get cat-called by some strange man and am reminded that I am, in fact, still a second-class citizen in many ways. That at the first blush, I am a woman.

Hurley said something that crushed me pretty early on in this book, so I’m going to quote it here.

[Joanna] Russ expressed the white-hot rage I felt at realizing the game was rigged against me from the start, and that no matter how equal I believed I was, the world was going to treat me like a woman, whether I liked it or not. Her book The Female Man is so ragingly, teeth-gnashingly nuts that I couldn’t get through it the first couple of times I tried. the title also gave voice to something I felt all the time – that I was a human, a man – not in the sense that I felt disassociated from my female body, but in the sense that I, too, had bought that women were somehow “other” and I wasn’t “other” so I must be a man, a real human too, right?

I had to put the book down when I read that, because I was that girl and it hurt to see someone else put those words on paper. I had thought that I was an anomaly. When my father read me the Lord of the Rings I was Frodo. Frodo, after all, was the hero. I was the hero. The biology didn’t factor in. I only really became aware of the way that my gender and sex had shaped my life once I became an adult and had names for some of the things that had happened to me as an adolescent – and continue to happen, because unfortunately adulthood doesn’t give you a free pass from sexual harassment.

Grappling with that sense of betrayal, with that sudden awareness, is a lot of what prompted the major plot points of Mother of Creation. Coming into adulthood and feeling purely betrayed by the promises of my youth, by the idea that I could be anything I wanted to be, was a harrowing experience. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I was insulated from that experience, relative to others. I am, as I mentioned, relatively privileged. My privilege includes a family that loves me and supports me in all sorts of craziness – including haring off to Japan and leaving a perfectly good, if dull and terrible, job to be a homeless traveler for a month. I always knew, if things got too bad, that I could go home. A lot of people don’t have that. Liana, the princess of the Creation Saga, does not have that. She has no home to go back to, and must face whatever the road throws at her.

But she, too, is fighting to be seen as a real human, despite the barriers of her sex and the situation of her birth. So many of us are.

Reading The Geek Feminist Revolution was like reading a love letter to all of us geek girls who wanted, so badly, to feel like we were human. It’s an at times violent and troubling love letter, but that violence is never turned towards us. Its turned against all of those who would suppress our stories, our muchness. Hurley’s keen analytical mind dissects our stories, the ones we have consumed and the ones that have consumed us. She lays our souls bare. The goal of every writer is to accomplish as much.

I think I did an update not too long ago talking about how my S.O. and I had gotten engaged in April. Then there were several trainwrecks that happened – his grandmother passed away, for one, and I had some drama with my folks over the engagement. Normal life things, but they do take a lot of energy and time.

On the writing side of things I have been submitting my most recent batch of short stories. I’ve had, as expected, numerous rejections, though I’ve had two of those rejections come back slightly positive, with one being a personalized rejection and the other being short-listed before being cut. That has been encouraging. My short stories are definitely in a different place than they were even two years ago, and I can feel my style changing. I think that will be good, as long as it’s positive change that tightens the pacing and the characters, and not change that erases my voice. Also, I got new notebooks!

The cutest notebooks! I’ve already started writing in the flower one! My favorite are the cacti.I’ve also read some good books. Luna: New Moon has been my favorite recently, which is no surprise as it is by the master Ian McDonald. His work is amazing. I’ve started The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi on audiobook as well as Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. The former is for running to, and the latter for listening to while driving to work. I love the voice of the narrators for both of these books, but especially the voice for Bad Feminist. She has such a rich tone. (Though I have learned more about competitive Scrabble than I ever wanted to with that book.) And I have been reading Princess Jellyfish, which is a manga – the anime was on Netflix a while ago, which is what got me into it. You can download the chapters on Comixology through your Amazon account, so that’s a pretty neat thing if you’re into graphic novels.

Lastly, I’ve been working in my garden, but the groundhog has found a way to climb over my fence and started eating everything so I need to fix that desperately. Pretty much all of my lettuce, peas, carrots and kale have been wiped out. I harvested all of the spinach and chard before she could get to it though, so at least I managed that much. I haven’t been over to the other garden to check the tomatoes and peppers, because there is construction going on around it so it makes it hard to stop in right now, and also because we have had rain every day for weeks so I’m not worried about watering the plants. The S.O. and I will probably make it by there in the morning since he is not working this weekend, which means pancakes and walks all over the neighborhood for garden checks and fruitshare pickup and getting movies for the week at the library.

Oh, and I may be switching jobs soon, which has been taking up a lot of my time and I’m very excited about for a lot of reasons, but I will tell you more about that perhaps at a later date. Suffice to say that I am only considering the move because of how amazing the position is, and if I get it I won’t have to commute anymore. Less time for audiobooks, but I’m happy for the trade if it means I’m more productive at home.

Hey, everyone! This is a special surprise post to let you know that I will be having a book signing at the Tanglewood Barnes and Noble in Roanoke, Virginia in conjunction with the national event B-Fest. I’ll be doing the signing on Friday, June 10th at 6 pm and then doing the trivia night event afterwards at 7 pm. The Facebook event is here. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been blessed in life to have wound up living in Southwest Virginia, an emerald land with lots of mountains and hiking trails. The Appalachian Trail goes right by my city, continuing north and south, connecting acres of national and state forests one to the other. Thru-hikers pass through every spring and summer, going from Georgia to Vermont with nothing but the packs on their backs and the power of their legs. And my fiance and I often hope on stretches of this trail, spending one or two nights sleeping in the open, climbing mountain after mountain.

Even a short overnight of 10 to 15 miles can be intimidating if you are not used to that level of exertion. This weekend, we climbed Dragon’s Tooth, a 2.5 mile peak notorious for its difficulty. Part of the last mile must be climbed using both hands and feet, over tumbled rocks. But the view from the top is wonderful, a wide green valley, and if you’re agile and brave you can climb the Tooth itself, a jagged jut of stone perhaps a hundred feet high. It was windy, so we stayed off the Tooth this time, contenting ourselves with snacks and the view from beneath its leaning bulk. We were exhausted, muscles burning in the chilly air of a late cold snap. We consumed our snacks ravenously, climbed a small boulder nearby and soaked up some sun.

Then it was time to come back down. We made excellent time, jumping off the rocks we had labored so carefully to climb over. There were no options to stop, just spare moments of rest snatched to keep us moving. The trail goes on as long as it does. You can’t cash in before the ending.

But a trail at least ends. There is a peak, or perhaps a waterfall, or a valley. There is a parking lot. Life also ends, but only when you’re dead. It is full of interlocking tasks, steps up the mountain, and there is no pausing. You only have what you carry with you. You can’t cash in before the end.

Writing, as a career, is a lifelong obsession. And like climbing a mountain, it is long, slow work. Unlike climbing a mountain, there is no recognizable peak to tell you that you’re done. You don’t always know if you have made it. I was reminded of this today when reading Kameron Hurley’s blogpost “Dancing for Dinner”, when she said this:

“If you are going to play this game, remember that there is a long road ahead. Remember that it’s not always a straight path. Remember that those with the aura of fame probably still have day jobs. Remember that they are still people. Remember that they are dancing for their dinner, just like the rest of us. Remember the slog.”

I know the slog. I know the place you have to be to make it up the mountain, and then down, and then back up the next one. It’s not a place that hurries. Hurrying frustrates, and frustration is exhausting. You’ll never keep going that way. To live through a hike, you have to enjoy it. You have to breathe deeply of the air and stop to look at cool leaves, strange flowers, ponies, cows, raccoons, even people. You have to take care of yourself, pace yourself, be careful not to get blisters or ticks or scrapes that will slow you down later. You have to rest when the sun goes down and rise with it in the morning. And take pictures – that’s always nice.

Aren’t these woods gorgeous?

All of this introspection is just to say, in the words of Liz C. Long: “Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.” We are all working forward one step at a time. Work at your own pace. Do what you can. Don’t compare yourself to other people on the trail, and don’t worry too much about how much further you have to go. You’re never going to be finished, but that’s okay. The beauty is in the journey. You’re writing because you love to write, aren’t you?

I follow a group on Facebook called The Writer’s Circle. Recently they posted this lovely graphic.

It’s a good start at what it is to be a writer, but it’s not all-encompassing.

This week, my primary contributions to my writing career have included: blogging, networking, reviewing a contract, offering critique on a voice file, and reaching out to my cover designer with a couple of new projects. Writing did occur, of course – without that, the rest of the stuff becomes moot, after all – but most of my energy, proportionally, was on all of the things needed to make a finished story more accessible to readers. In other words, the stuff that makes money.

My experience as a writer is different from the experience of a traditionally published author, but not by much. The things a traditionally published author doesn’t have to worry about include: commissioning audiobooks, commissioning cover art, and other similar outsourcing. The things a traditionally published author does have to worry about includes all of those iceberg items, as well as marketing, working with a publisher’s demands, reviewing contracts, critiquing products such as covers (depending on how much creative license they are allowed by their contracts), querying….you get the picture. There is a lot going on behind the scenes of a book, and it isn’t just the hours and hours of writing the thing, or the hours and hours of editing it. It’s formatting, primping, marketing, and all of the other things that go into creating a salable product.

Unfortunately, this kind of work takes away from writing time, and a writer doesn’t really get paid for it. What I mean by that is, writers don’t get paid by the hour. They get paid by what they can produce and how quickly they can manage that production. The other stuff that it takes to get that produced work on the table of someone else is dead time between creating more works. But it’s necessary dead time – you cannot sell a book without a cover, that’s for sure.

Greater authors than I have written on this subject, but it’s something that I think gets talked about too little. No matter which path you choose, self-publishing or traditional publishing, you are going to be spending time on the housekeeping side of writing. Even if you have an amazing agent and amazing editor managing some of the moving parts, a lot of the work still falls on you. There are definitely trade-offs between pathways in terms of the amounts of work and kinds of work you undertake, but you’re still going to have to work on things that aren’t writing.

If you’re not writing full-time, but instead juggling a day job on top of your writing career, this slows new releases considerably – something that can be really detrimental to your writing career in the long-term. I’ve always been jealous of those folks who have the income or ability to leave their dayjob and write full-time. My productivity in writing a first draft with a dayjob versus without is seriously limited. It takes me a third of the time to write a new book when not juggling other obligations that it does to write a new book with those obligations.

In closing, writing is an iceberg, and an unpredictable one. The next time you are reading a book, please spare a kind thought for all of the unseen work of the writer.

I’m going to indulge in what might be a terrible metaphor. It’s about books. Not the ones I write, but the ones I read. And I read a lot of books.

I read for a lot of reasons. First of all, I enjoy it. My favorite books to read for fun involve plucky young heroines performing seemingly impossible tasks, usually with humor thrown in, and maybe a little romance. Of course, I also need heavier fare. Most of my favorite books overall tend to deal with deep themes and richly imagined worlds, not always an overlap.

Stress relief is also something I get from books. In the purest form, books are an escape. The best ones are more, but even in cases where that doesn’t happen if you can keep my attention long enough I will read your book and forget about my life for a little while. Generally this helps my brain a lot. I become a happier human less likely to cry on someone or get irrationally angry at them for something. We all have personality quirks, and mine is that I stew on things and berate myself over them unless I can be effectively distracted. Books help with that.

The other thing books do for me is inspire. Getting us back to that metaphor.

Books are my rocket fuel. When I read a good book, and often when I read a bad one, I itch with the need to write. Words are consumed, and they become more words. I create. Honestly, this is the best feeling in the world. The feeling of words moving through me to become other words is an incredibly transcendent and intimate thing. I am celestial in those moments. I have made it to the stars.

The end of April has passed me by, leaving us solidly in May, the last month of spring. Life has been amazingly busy.

First, I submitted several short stories to different magazines throughout April. I’m very excited to hear back from them, as I know they are some of my best work in that category to date. Responses should start rolling in over the next few weeks, and I promise to blog about any positive news.

I got engaged in April, that’s a big deal. That was towards the end of April, and I really can’t remember if I’ve blogged about it here or not! The ring is gorgeous, the man is a gentle, lovely human who also happens to be my best friend, and the proposal was adorable and involved origami. What more can you want? A lot of my spare time over the past few weeks has gone into trying to get my ducks in a row to start wedding planning. House hunting has therefore been put on hold. There are a lot of political aspects to wedding planning that have involved me trying to reach out specially to different parts of the family to express that I really can’t keep up with drama right now. That has…had mixed results. The day job has also had some recent ups and downs.

Towards the end of April, I accepted a contract to have Mother of Creation produced as an audiobook. This is a wonderful thing, to me, as it makes my story more accessible. I’m excited for the potential new readers in the Creation Saga, though I will say this whole audiobook learning curve is pretty steep. For those who have self-published or still retain their audio rights, the service I am using is ACX, and Amazon subsidiary that produces books which will be available on Audible and ITunes. I have to say, the first time I heard someone reading my words out loud in a recording, I almost cried with joy. I definitely spun around in circles until I was dizzy, proving that I am still a five-year-old at least 20% of the day. I’ll probably do a more extensive blog on this process once I have gotten through it to inform you of some of the unexpected hurtles.

All in all it has been a crazy busy season, and promises to continue to be. But the flowers sure are pretty.